Rolling Stone Bill Wyman can't get no satis-fag-tion

Oct 25 2009

“I had a big check-up in France and they said: ‘If you don’t stop you are going to get serious problems with your lungs.’

“I didn’t have any problems with anything cancerous. I was just having problems breathing.

“They said: ‘If you carry on, you are going to get emphysema. You are very close to starting.’

“So I thought: ‘Sod it! I’m going to stop.’

“I carried on smoking but I stopped inhaling. It just slowly fell away over the months.

“Every time I fancied a cigarette I just had one, in the hand and all that – the physical thing. But I would not inhale. I would just puff on it, and it went down to nothing.”

“I was very lucky that it didn’t affect my health,” he says.

Although he has been eligible to draw his pension for eight years, Wyman says he isn’t bothered about his age.

“I was worried when I was turning 40. I didn’t like that at all. It just didn’t seem right,” he admits.

“But since then I haven’t given a damn. It doesn’t matter at all. I don’t care about my age. I am still mobile.”

Despite his active musician’s life – he also runs a restaurant, Sticky Fingers, is a keen photographer and an avid metal detectorist – Wyman insists he doesn’t follow a special fitness regime.

“I do nothing,” he says. “I don’t do exercise. I don’t have special diets. I don’t do any of that crap. I don’t believe it.

“I think it might improve your health by 2% if you do all that, but hardly at all. I don’t jog. No, I don’t do nothing.”

Emphysema is a lung condition that affects the small air sacs (alveoli) where oxygen passes into the blood and carbon dioxide passes out. Over time, less oxygen gets into the blood, reducing the supply to vital organs.

Patients suffer crippling fatigue and oxygen may have to given by mask.

The majority of people with emphysema also have chronic bronchitis, and will have been heavy smokers.

Prof Sherwood Burge, consultant chest physician at Heartlands Hospital, Birmingham, said 95 per cent of emphysema cases were smoking related and the condition was devastating.

“It makes you progressively breathless,” he said. “People cannot tie their shoelaces because they cannot bend over. They can’t put their arms in the air. They can’t dry themselves with a towel. Life becomes pretty miserable.

“Huge numbers of people die of emphysema – tens of thousands in the UK every year. It is a very miserable end, one of the worst. Dying gasping for breath is one of the nastiest ways to die.”

BILL’S STONES TOP 10

1. I Can’t Get No Satis-FAG-tion

2. Jumping Jack ASH

3. EXHALE On Main Street

4. It’s Only Rock and ROLL-UP

5. Get Off Of My Cloud

6. PANT It Black

7. The Last Time

8. Time ISN’T On My Side

9. Can You Hear Me COUGHIN’?

10. It’s All Over Now